Our 20 Most Anticipated Movies Of 2010

As we come to the end of 2009, it’s time to look forward and put together our list of our most anticipated movies of 2010.

Last year could have been worse – 5 of our 10 most anticipated movies of 2009 turned out to live up to our expectations (including Watchmen, Up, and Star Trek), while the other five ranged from mediocre (Public Enemies) to downright disappointing (Terminator Salvation, Wolverine, Transformers 2). Of course “most anticipated” does not necessarily mean “movies we think are going to be awesome” – it’s “movies we hope are going to be awesome.”

This year the task was made a lot easier thanks to our senior editor Kofi Outlaw putting together Screen Rant’s2010 movie preview, giving us a one-stop list from which to gather the biggies. While last year was a group effort, this year I’ve decided to pull rank and come up with the list myself, with some fine tuning help from editors Kofi and Rob Keyes.

So, without further delay…

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Screen Rant’s 20 Most Anticipated Movies of2010:

Green Hornet made it onto the list just on morbid curiosity. I’m a big fan of the 60s TV series and was hoping to see a serious take on it on the big screen. However the production has not been smooth to say the least with apparent differences of opinion between Seth Rogen, director Michael Gondry and Stephen Chow (who eventually left the production altogether), production delays, script changes, etc. We’ll see what the final product looks like at the end of 2010.

M. Night Shyamalan has been a victim of his own success (and his ego) with each of his films getting pretty much worse than the one that came before. However here he will be tackling something completely different from anything he has ever done before, and based on the one trailer we’ve seen so far it looks like it may turn out to be impressive. We’ll see.

Benicio del Toro is a great actor and I’m looking forward to seeing him as the tortured soul cursed by the, uh, curse of the werewolf. It looks like they’ll be trying to do as much as they can with practical visual effects (although I’m sure there will be CGI as well) and that suits this film.

While some were disappointed (myself included) that director Ridley Scott decided to drop a couple of unique concepts for the story from the final product (Russell Crowe playing both Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, the sheriff as the good guy and Robin as the villain), this still looks like a great, reality-based update of the story.

If there was ever a film that was suited to the twisted vision of Tim Burton, this is it. I’m not the biggest Burton fan and some of what I’ve seen in the trailer doesn’t quite work for me (the Red Queen’s head is so huge it looks cartoonish), but overall this is bound to be a feast for the senses and probably the closest a screen version will get to the source material.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street is a horror classic and we’re all curious to see how this reboot/remake turns out. From what has been shown it seems like they may tone down the humor and dial up some of the more realistic aspects of the story. Really looking forward to Jackie Earle Haley’s take on Freddy Krueger.

With some interesting casting choices (Liam Neeson as “Hannibal” Smith, Bradley Cooper from The Hangover and Sharlto Copley from District 9) and director Joe Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces) behind the camera, this could turn out to be a fun hat-tip to the original series.